Why Corporations Despise Remote Work

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If you followed virtually any news outlet during the pandemic, you might have caught a recurring template.

As soon as any remote signs of recovery appear on the horizon, bank managers, wealthy CEOs, and other corporate overlords start stressing that “workers need to come back to their offices as soon as possible.”

Rather strange, as countless studies examining the remote working situation keep demonstrating that productivity increases when working from home. Isn’t that enough to tickle the corporatist’s profit incentive fetish?

Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. While productivity does lead to more efficiency in business operations and, conversely, a larger profit, remote working stands to destroy something even more quintessential to the capitalist world: work culture.

In this article, we’ll have a look at how this can and should happen, along with why business owners desperately try to avoid it. Hint: it’s not because it is “bad for your mental health.”

The workweek illusion

During the Industrial Revolution, workweeks could span to even 80 hours, and no bureaucrat bothered to outlaw child labor until much later on. Then, in the 20th Century, most countries abridged it to 12 hours per day.

Now, the workweek stands at 40 hours, amounting to 8 hours per day. However, remote workers are quick to discover that the work culture’s “mandatory office time” doesn’t exactly hold water. Even before the pandemic, study after study demonstrated that office workers are only getting things done for 3 hours per day.

Now that many of us are working remotely on the daily, more and more people awake to the realization that we don’t need to work 8 hours a day. Obviously, jobs such as emergency dispatchers don’t make the cut here.

I’m talking about office workers.

So, why are our bosses paying us for 5 extra hours if we mainly don’t get anything done during this time? Moreover, why are they doing anything they can to drag us back into office?

The answer is scarcity. All around us, multi-billion dollar entertainment industries rely on us believing that our leisure time is scarce. A general law of economics says that scarcity increases demand, which also increases the price we are willing to pay.

So, work culture, office rat-racing, and the mandatory 8 hours all play a part in the broader illusion that is the scarcity of leisure. The scarcer off-time is, the more we are willing to pay to make the most of it.

But why have work hours decreased since the Industrial Revolution? Obviously, because people have woken up to the realization that working 16 hours a day is not necessary, nor humane. Neither is working 8 in many cases, but propaganda led us to believe that it is.

The disruption of remote working

So, what makes remote work so dangerous to the corporate work culture?

Think about it: when you finish your work in the office, you still have to wait out the 8 hours. You talk to colleagues, drink a coffee, browse the Internet mindlessly, or get micromanaged by your boss. Aside from these, there isn’t much more you can do.

But at home, the narrative changes drastically. You can watch Netflix in the meantime, have a chat with your family or roommates, play with your pet, or go for a walk. If your work is on a per-project basis, you can even finish early and treat yourself to an afternoon with friends.

The contrast is rather obvious. With remote working, you stand to claim leisure time back from the overlords. The 8 hours of work no longer mean that you are locked in a bureaucratic prison for the first part of the day.

Now imagine if this were to be the norm. First off, your life would stop being centered around work for half of your existence. Corporate ladder races would start becoming less appealing. Soon, people would start questioning why amusement parks, restaurants, or cafes are so expensive.

More businesses would spring up in these sectors, prices would be driven down by competition, and the entertainment industry would miss out on quite a bit of brainwashing cash. Much more than what your productivity brings to their table.

So, you can bet that everyone in the corporate leadership world will do their desperate best to prevent a remote work culture from happening. Because in corporatism, humanity is not allowed.

The take

Work culture was and will continue to be a toxic veil of false promises and pointless competition among the workers. Their goal is not to provide you with “great opportunities” or a “friendly work environment”.

They want to lock you up in an office for as long as they can frame it to be okay, then force you to pay extra to live your life in the meantime. Or just stop living your life altogether. And they will happily pay the 5 extra hours to do it.

So, what should you do about it as an average worker?

The answer is rather simple: fight. Join a union, highlight the benefits of remote working to your colleagues, go on strike against abusive bosses, open a business and work on a per-contract basis. Anything that increases your bargaining power will help you claim back what is rightfully yours.

And, perhaps the most important of them all: don’t fall for their illusion. The worst thing you can do as a worker is to gobble up the bollocks notion that working in a company will give you some sort of fulfillment. It will not.

It will only make you part of a group of minions that quietly work overtime and fill the pockets of the overlords with stolen money. Does that sound like fulfillment to you? I think not.

Claim your time back, claim your life back. You deserve it more than you think.